Former prize-winning Russian schoolboy given 6-year prison sentence for ‘incitement to terrorism’

A court in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg has sentenced a 20-year-old student to six years in a penal colony for “incitement to terrorism” for comments he left on online posts, Idel.Realii, part of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, reported on Tuesday.

According to the investigation, Makar Nikolaev had written encouraging comments to online posts by the Freedom of Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, both of which fight on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the war against Russia. One comment read: “Good on you! You’re cracking open tanks as if they were nuts. Don’t give Putin’s scum a moment to relax.”

Nikolaev fully admitted his guilt, though his defence team argued that he had written the comments after being “bullied by Ukrainian students”. He was arrested in August when he flew to his home city of Ufa, in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, for the summer holidays from his political science course at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. In September, Rosfinmonitoring, Russia’s financial watchdog, added Nikolaev to its list of “terrorists and extremists”.

In 2020, while still a schoolboy, Nikolaev developed a search method which helped create a national archive devoted to the history of World War II. His project won first prize in the My Country — My Russia contest, part of the presidential Russia — Land of Opportunities campaign, according to a now-deleted post on his school website.